(mostly dumb trivia follows) > Anyone ever play with fanfold paper tape?
As far as I know, IBM products "never"* used fanfold paper tape, but rather spools. The 1620 had a big paper tape reader, as did the 1130 and 1800 minicomputers. Interesting, when the System/7 came out, IBM just rebadged ASR33s from Teletype, calling them 5028s. When I was digging out the remains of a surplus place in Los Alamos (the infamous Black Hole), some of the items that I found were a pair of IBM 870 systems. These are "Steampunk Wordprocessors", built on a 026 keypunch. Each 870 has a paper tape reader, paper tape punch, card reader and punch, plus a model B typewriter. All this fun, with tubes, relays, plugboards, blinkenlights, cards, and tapes, were used to convert data from the labs various minicomputer paper tape reels to something that could be turned into fancy looking lab reports. I also found an 047 - basically a paper tape to card converter, also made on an 026 chassis. These were used, somewhat like with the 870s, to convert the various labs minicomputer output paper tapes to something the 7094 could understand - cards. There was a S/360 channel connected paper tape reader as well, whose number escapes me right now. There is at least one in preservation now. -- Will, happy because I just took delivery of a 3880. * Start the countdown to when someone brings up an example to prove I am wrong! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
